Kosher for Gentiles

I grew up in a small town in rural Illinois, where Jews were few and far between. In a different part of the country, we’d hardly have counted as Jewish; my mother converted to Judaism before she married my Jewish father, but a decade later they both became Presbyterians. Still, my dad’s cultural and religious traditions remained an important part of our family life and, while it probably would have been simpler to commit to one faith, our parents made sure that my siblings and I didn’t forget that we were Jews. So the seeds of my Jewish identity were planted among corn and cows, alongside Christians, against intermittent, low-grade, school-yard anti-Semitism, in a town where clueless teachers routinely asked me to stand before the class and explain “Hanukkah, the Jewish Christmas.” Every spring, we piled into the station wagon with my dad, who drove miles in search of a grocery store that sold Passover food. In a larger town, twenty minutes away, we could usually find a few Manischewitz products on a bottom shelf—a dusty jar of borscht, a tin of macaroons, a box of matzo. That orange-and-green logo was a beacon.

On Tuesday, Manischewitz announced its purchase by Sankaty Advisors, a branch of the private-equity firm Bain Capital. Manischewitz was formed in 1888, when Rabbi Dov Behr Manischewitz began baking matzo for his friends and family in Cincinnati. His bakery became a kosher-food behemoth; by 1990, when Manischewitz was purchased by Kohlberg & Company, a private-equity firm, the company was responsible for eighty per cent of the matzo sold in the U.S., according to the Times. Since then, Manischewitz has had a string of different owners. Sankaty will take over from a group of investors including the hedge fund Harbinger Capital.

According to Mark Weinsten, the company’s newly appointed interim C.E.O., the future of Manischewitz may include a lot more gentiles: while kosher food for Jewish customers will remain the company’s focus, “There are people that are interested, or that could be interested, in our products who are not in our core base right now,” he told me.

Weinsten thinks that Manischewitz can appeal to a broader group of customers in two ways: first, by enticing them with products—soups, sardines, desserts—that compete directly with versions from mainstream manufacturers on the basis of taste, and, second, through the “kosher” designation, which he believes is increasingly appealing to non-Jewish people who are interested in healthy, natural foods and who are concerned about standards of food production.

Manischewitz plans to educate consumers about what “kosher” means beyond “a religious certification,” Weinsten told me. Kosher rules are concerned with Biblical and rabbinical law—meat has to be slaughtered in a particular way, for example—not some secular notion of quality. Still, Weinsten thinks that the standard is broadly relevant to consumers. “We can only use certain kinds of products, you know—raw materials,” he said. “There is a very high level of supervision.”

A survey of American Jews conducted last year by the Pew Research Center found that only twenty-two per cent keep kosher at home. But seventy per cent (including those who identify as Jewish but not religious) had attended a Seder, the ritual meal marking the beginning of Passover, in the past year. Manischewitz sells its products year-round, but it is the Butterball of Passover—a brand that seems almost an extension of the holiday itself. For someone who grew up eating Manischewitz foods at Passover, it might be hard to imagine their appeal to folks concerned about healthy, natural eating. If you squint, matzo—unleavened bread in the form of a floppy disk: square, flat, dry—might resemble a diet food from the eighties, the sort of thing that a woman might nibble sadly after completing a Jane Fonda aerobics video. But what about macaroons, dense nuggets of coconut whose sweetness makes your teeth throb? Eating them like biting into a cavity. And then there’s the most divisive delicacy on the Seder table: gefilte fish, a sort of damp fish patty, simultaneously spongy and flaky. Manischewitz packs it in broth, jelled or liquid. For me, the pleasure of gefilte fish is almost purely nostalgic. I want one bite a year, horseradish heaped on top.

This is hearty, traditional holiday food. It’s also generally food that comes in jars and boxes, convenience food, just like Bubbe used to make, but with a fraction of the hassle and, presumably, a lot more preservatives. (Weinsten pointed out that Manischewitz makes “a wide range of products,” including lighter, everyday foods like soups; he also said that gefilte fish was actually a “pretty healthy product.”)

I asked Rabbi Menachem Genack, the C.E.O. of the kosher division at the Orthodox Union, which provides kosher certification to food producers, including Manischewitz, about the perception among some consumers that a kosher designation indicated purer, healthier food. “People who consider ‘kosher’ somehow more healthful or better quality—that is not always accurate, necessarily,” he told me. Still, he said, some people take comfort in the “extra pair of eyes” that comes with kosher inspection.

The first part of Weinsten’s strategy—getting customers to choose Manischewitz products simply because they taste good—seems more likely than “kosher” taking off as a quality standard among natural-food types. But who knows? If “kosher” does manage to attract a broader following, it might make it easier for a lonely Jew in a little town to find some matzo next Passover.